Monday, 7 September 2015

Carmen Jones (1954)

Carmen Jones

”Carmen
Jones” is a film version of Georges Bizet’s opera ”Carmen” set in war time America
with an all-black (to varying degree) cast. Really?? This sounds like an idea
cooked up while smoking some serious weed.

Does it
work then? Njaeh… to some extent I suppose. The score is great of course. “Carmen”
is a world famous opera for a reason and this musical was best when I closed my
eyes and focused on the music alone. The lyrics are adapted to fit the story in
this rendering and as the story is set in the black sub-culture we get all
sorts of slang and inflections. Had this been a complete reworking I would have
found this pretty cool and definitely a fresh take on a classic score, but they
insisted on making this an opera in the classic sense and so it becomes a
clash. Just plain weird, really.

I did not
like this movie. Not at all actually, and for several reasons. Not so much for
the music though. It is odd but I can live with it.

My main
complaint is the story itself, which may seem unfair considering that it is
surprisingly true to the original story. I do not like it when people ruin
their lives and even less when they ruin other people’s lives and that is the
essence of this particular story. The agent of all this ruin is Carmen Jones (Dorothy
Dandridge), who may be the most egoistic character in cinema history. Well,
close at least. I fully understand that she is a powerful, liberated woman and
all too often women have to follow the men and not the other way round, but
Carmen is selfish by any standards and everything in her life is about getting
what she want and to hell with the costs others may pay. She gets her
comeuppance, but not before she has done her damage.

To start
with we meet Joe (Harry Belafonte) and Cindy Lou (Olga James), a sweet couple
about to get married. Cindy Lou is seeking out Joe on the army base where he is
stationed just before he is leaving for flight school to become a pilot.
Everything looks great for the two of them.

Then Carmen
Jones happens. Realizing Joe is the one guy in the army barracks not interested
in her she sets full sail on her seduction of him. She manages to get arrested
for causing a row with the other girls and Joe is picked to take her to a
civilian prison in Masonville, far far away.For a while he manages to fend her off and when he ties her up I had to
smile for I think the only time in the entire movie. Had he slapped her I could
also have forgiven him. She was a job to get done so he could get back and get
married.

Alas, in
the end her seducing ways succeed and Joe is turned to the dark side. Ah, well,
his problem. She thanks him by running away so has to do time in the stockade instead
of going to flight school. When he comes out they seek each other out, him with
the good news that he can go to flight school after all, but that is not good
enough for her. She want him close. What good is a man you cannot be with? So she
coerces him into a fight that forces him to go with her, now as a fugitive from
the army. Having sucked him dry Carmen now moves on to a famous prize fighter
and starts on him instead leaving behind a wreck of a man.

This is the
kind of story that forces me not to invest too much in the characters. One is
not worth my care and the other is a lost case. I just feel sorry for Cindy
Lou.

I also have
an issue with the setup. This feel quite a lot like exploitation. The all-black
cast feels like a gimmick. Maybe to allow the characters to be more daring,
which is degrading, or to add some black elements to the music, which would
have been great, but is mostly lost because of the insistence on the opera. The
exclusion of white people also reminds of segregation, which does not feel good
either.

Then of
course there is the classic musical problem where reality suddenly shifts into
a stage, but here I see that mostly as a minor problem. I was too happy to get
away from the story and into some music.

“Carmen
Jones” felt like an ordeal, something I just had to get over with and that is
just too bad because I wanted to like it. For blackploitation I much prefer “Shaft”.
This one just left me with a bad taste.

In case
anybody takes offense with my reference to blacks and white instead of more
politically correct terms, I apologize. This is a movie that moves in that
sphere. The actors are black not because it is cool, but because it facilitates
some degrading clichés.

Yes, I noticed that. According to Wikipedia neither Dandridge nor Belafonte could sing opera and so opera singers were found. the question here is who cooked up the ludicrous idea that it had to be opera? They should have taken the full step and adapted all the music to the very vibrant black music scene at the time. Now that would be a musical I would like to see!

Disclaimer on spoilers

If you have not seen these movies yet you may want to skip out on reading these commentaries. I am rarely holding back from revealing details from the movies that a proper review would hide under a spoiler tag. The reason is that these are not really reviews, but just my comments on the movies and some of the details which are most interesting to comment on are exactly the parts which will spoil the surprise if you have not seen it yet. So be warned.

About Me

In 2010 I started the project of gathering and seeing the 1001 movies listed in "1001 movies to see before you die". This is a blog to allow me to comment on them.
I am married with a son and geologist by training. Since 99 I have worked as a wind engineer at EMD (www.emd.dk) where I mostly work with wind studies and noise.